Climate negotiations: time to implement planetary health promises
Authors: Arthur Wyns
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2022)

Six months on from the Glasgow climate talks, countries are struggling to deliver on their Paris Agreement promises. In June of 2022, diplomats from 197 countries gathered at the headquarters of UN climate change in Bonn, Germany. Under the fretful eye of thousands of climate experts and activists, they spent two weeks laying the groundwork for the next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) later this year; COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. It had been six months since the COP26 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland; where there had been a renewed sense of momentum for the promises of the Paris Agreement. Glasgow saw the finalisation of the so-called rulebook of the Paris Agreement, and a renewed commitment by countries to more ambitious climate plans, as part of a Glasgow Climate Pact. But a lot can change in six months, and the diplomats gathered in Bonn have had to navigate the technical climate talks in the background of a deadly cocktail of unfolding events in the real world, including: the invasion of Ukraine; escalating food and energy crises; continuing pandemic reverberations; and a constant barrage of climate change-fuelled extreme weather events in the first half of 2022. Six months on from COP26, governments struggled to keep the Glasgow legacy alive. The Bonn climate talks failed to reflect a sense of urgency, says Charles Hamilton, a diplomatic coordinator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS): “Bonn was low success on all fronts, much work remains to be done.” The agenda in Bonn included how to cut emissions faster, how to help people and communities adapt to a changing climate, how to provide climate finance and other means of support, and how to deal with the effects of climate change that are already happening. This policy brief provides an overview of recent developments at the Bonn climate talks and explores their relevance to health, and the signals about what we might expect at COP27. The need to accelerate emissions cuts was a key priority in Bonn. At COP26, leaders had pledged to “revisit and strengthen” their climate goals, thereby helping to close the huge “ambition gap” that still remains – the difference between keeping global temperature rise to the 1·5°C goal of the Paris Agreement versus the 2·7°C increase that current climate pledges would collectively lead to if fully implemented. Countries agreed in Glasgow to update their 2030 climate goals, also known as their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), alongside Long-Term Strategies (LTS) for 2050 targets. The submission of stronger climate targets would have sent a strong signal ahead of Bonn. Unfortunately, of the world's major emitters, only Brazil and Australia have submitted new NDCs so far, and neither are in line with a 1·5°C scenario. At COP26 countries also agreed to develop a Mitigation Work Programme (MWP) to “urgently scale up mitigation ambition and implementation”. This work programme is an important new structure under the UNFCCC to close the ambition gap, the details of which will have to be decided at COP27. After two weeks of climate negotiations in Bonn, however, countries could not agree on what the set-up and focus of the MWP should be, and had strong disagreements around which countries should be considered “major emitters” and whether or not to consider sectoral mitigation targets. With no agreement in sight, the negotiations were put on ice, to be picked up again at COP27. Bonn also saw some initial progress on the issue of adaptation; a priority for African nations and COP27 host country Egypt. Broadly speaking, adaptation seeks to strengthen the resilience, reduce the vulnerability, and enhance the adaptative capacity of people, communities and sectors in the face of climate change. It can be understood as the other side of the coin of mitigation. The Paris Agreement describes the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) as a benchmark of success—similarly to how it sets the 1·5°C temperature goal as a benchmark of success for reducing emissions. At COP26, countries agreed to establish the Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh Work Programme (GlaSS)—a series of workshops and discussions to help define the GGA.“ In order to understand how we progress, we need metrics that enable us to say how we are doing on adaptation, what is getting implemented, and whether that is making a difference,” said Dr Johanna Nalau, an adaptation scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment report. Unlike mitigation – which is measured in metrics that can be quantified and standardised relatively easily, like emission cuts and temperature rise - adaptation is harder to capture. Not only does it cover a variety of sectors, actions, and scales, it is also notoriously difficult to evaluate its effectiveness. For example, how do you measure whether a certain adaptation project has made a hospital resilient against flooding? And would that measure still be useful for a hospital in a different region, or measured against a different impact? What does health resilience look like, and how do we measure it? These questions have far-reaching political implications. It is very hard to effectively change (or fund) what you can’t measure, which is one of the reasons for the historic funding gap that exists for adaptation work. The GlaSS Work Programme made initial progress in Bonn, with more workshops to come ahead of COP27. However, participation by health stakeholders has been very limited thus far. Stronger health engagement going forward would help countries better understand the adaptation needs, gaps and barriers for the health sector, and how these relate to assessing our collective progress on adaptation.“ There will be ongoing discussion as to what the Global Goal on Adaptation could or should look like … and how reporting on the Goal will be done. The countries are all looking to work together on this so I would expect some of this to be solved by the end of COP27,” Dr Nalau said. While adaptation remains a high priority on the global climate action agenda, communities increasingly face climate impacts that are too severe to adapt to. “We are seeing climate impacts in our humanitarian work on the front lines of rising risks every day,” says Maarten Van Aalst of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “How we deal with these impacts matters enormously. We can deal with them in a planned way, with support where needed and in collaboration with everyone in a community, or we can be unprepared and therefore be forced by a sudden disaster.” This is known as loss and damage, and is approached in the UN climate negotiations in three distinct ways: averting loss and damage, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding the harm they would cause; minimising loss and damage, by helping people and communities adapt and prepare to the extent possible; and addressing loss and damage, by dealing with and recovering from the consequences of climate impacts. The health dimensions of this loss and damage could look like damaged health infrastructure, or the loss of lives and livelihoods, for example. Two key elements on loss and damage are under discussion in 2022: setting up of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage, which would function as a technical support hub for vulnerable countries, and the creation of a finance facility for loss and damage, a mechanism to channel additional financial support to countries experiencing impacts. The Santiago Network is expected to be inaugurated at COP27, and negotiations in Bonn were meant to develop a shared vision on what this support network should look like. However, countries could not agree on a negotiated outcome and will go into COP27 without consensus. Discussions on a potential financing facility for loss and damage took place in a new format; the Glasgow Dialogue. This is a two-year series of discussions, the first of which took place in Bonn, to explore possible arrangements for loss and damage funding. The format was agreed on at COP26, as a concession to vulnerable countries after rich countries refused to agree to a new finance facility. In Bonn, however, the new format did not diminish the pushback from rich countries like the US and EU against any new finance for the issue; a move that led to outrage among many delegates from vulnerable countries. “We emit almost nothing, but in our countries, there are islands sinking, landslides burying homes, hospitals washed away by climate change impacts. Rich countries have historical responsibility for this crisis, why shouldn’t they contribute to cleaning up the mess?”, said Madeleine Diouf, Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group (LDCs). The Bonn climate talks saw significant backtracking on the issue of loss and damage. “The Glasgow Dialogue is not even on the formal agenda for COP27,” said Harjeet Singh, a senior adviser at Climate Action Network. For COP27 to be a success, the first hurdle will be including this important topic in the negotiations, so that vulnerable countries feel their priorities are being addressed, Singh added. The health community played its most significant role yet at the 2021 Glasgow COP, with a record number of health professionals advocating on the side lines of the talks. Health received some more formal recognition through a COP26 Health Programme that established a number of health sector climate commitments from over 50 countries. Additionally, around a dozen health officials were part of their respective country delegations. Despite all this, health was not a consideration in the formal negotiations at COP26. Six months later, only a handful of health stakeholders attended the Bonn climate talks. “While the health community in Bonn was much smaller, we were able to engage at a much deeper level with negotiations,” said Jess Beagley, policy adviser at the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA). “This work is key if we are to have a presence and impact within the negotiations themselves, as well as the work being done widely to increase public awareness and the motivation of policymakers in-country.” Dr Marina Romanello, Executive Director at the Lancet Countdown, agrees: “We saw a lot more targeted engagement in Bonn, with the World Health Organization [WHO] and others getting more involved.” GCHA and other health groups delivered various health statements to the Bonn negotiations, including on the Mitigation Work Programme and negotiations around agriculture. “The health community is still not formally embedded in the UNFCCC process,” Dr Romanello says. “We still need more institutional engagement to un-silo the climate and the health space. The health argument could drive the climate negotiations forward.” In theory, the focus of the biannual UN climate negotiations has now moved to implementation. In practice, little remains of the careful momentum that was created at COP26. In Bonn, negotiators fell into old habits, and largely fretted over procedural matters, rather than concrete actions. The health community also seemed to have lost most of its excitement and determination in pushing for progress on the international stage. “The world is still falling catastrophically short of the ambition needed to deliver the Paris Agreement,” said Jess Beagley. Meanwhile, climate impacts and related losses and damages are escalating at a worrying pace. At COP27, we can expect that growing detachment from reality – the discrepancy between the pace of the climate negotiations on the one hand and the impact of the climate crisis on people's health and lives on the other—to continue. The Paris Agreement is hanging on for dear life. Will the health community help resuscitate it?